


Night flight

by ancestrallizard



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: M/M, Male My Unit | Kamui | Corrin, Nohr | Conquest Route, and silas bc that pairing tag is barren, some references to blood but nothing explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 01:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18297641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Corrin has anxious thoughts for 1000 words. Post Chapter 10





	Night flight

**Author's Note:**

> working on warming writing muscles back up. wrote this in two days which is slight progress for me?

Corrin stayed within view of the Nohrian fleet, keeping an eye on one ship in particular, even if only in his peripheral vision. It was one of the larger ones, and it carried the other royal siblings along with their retainers and closest troops. He knew Silas slept peacefully, was fairly sure Mozu and Felica were still asleep in their room that he passed on his way out, but he could only wonder if anyone else in the army was as restless as he.

The young prince raced above the dark water, rising and falling to avoid sudden rolling ocean waves. Miniature geysers of saline water caught on his claws and fangs, so cold he felt it through his scales. He made wide loops around the ships like an uneasy sheepdog, loud and obvious enough in his movements that he wouldn’t alarm any lookouts.

Flight over the open ocean was hard. Without the sun and resulting thermals to lift him, Corrin could only rely on his own power. He fought for every second in the air. Every beat of his wings sent pain lancing through his back, a reminder of the long arrow that lodged under his wing during the skirmish on the docks. The wound was closed now, safely cleaned and healed by Elise and Felicia, but movement agitated it. He welcomed the sensation. It reminded him he was alive, when the darkness around him and shock of battle after battle benumbed him.

They shouldn’t have affected him the way they had. He’d studied war since he could walk, had weapons placed in his hands not long after, and earned countless nicks and wounds during constant arduous practice. He was told from the start that his freedom depended on his performance. It was all a monumental amount of work to place on anyone, never mind a child, but even then Corrin embraced it. He crafted himself like a blacksmith working iron, breaking and burning and shaping himself into the perfect prince of a warrior kingdom.

For a short time he almost thought he was. Not perfect, never perfect, but finally ready to break free from the fortress walls and prove his worth. When he defeated Xander in that fateful duel and saw the pride in his brother’s gaze, Corrin’s soul went alight with the rare hope that he was on the right path, that he was doing right.

But there was an ocean of blood between theory and practice. He played the part of tactician and warrior prince without fault, but from the moment he felled someone in battle, something heavy and irreversible changed within him. Something akin to horror or disgust, except deeper and more pervasive. Rather than dissipating over time, like he’d seen it do for other new soldiers, his anathema towards the war and, increasingly, towards himself, took root in his spirit and corroded it like a gangrenous wound.

He schooled his outward reactions the way a life in the fortress had taught him to, so that none would know what ailed him, and it mostly worked until the fight on the docks dispassionately shattered his veneer. He saw Silas fall to a Hoshidan blade, limp and red-stained, and everything went black. He woke to the sound of Azura’s song, the Nohrian troops watching from a distance with blades pointed towards him, and too many dead Hoshidans around him to count. Pieces of them coated his fangs and antlers. He could taste them.

He wanted, then, to close his eyes and sleep, to call a time out and say he had had enough, as if it were all some awful game he had the power to stop.

Silas survived. They all survived, for the most part, ready to fight and die again on the orders of a fractured shell of a prince. 

The nerves in his back seared as he flew higher. He rose fast, putting more and more distance between himself and the fleet until they looked as distant and dim as the cold stars above.

He hovered, suspended between worlds. 

Corrin spent countless night staring from barred fortress windows at the constellations he felt close enough to touch now. He thought once he earned his place in the Nohrian family, the sight of the stars would always bring him joy and remind him of how far he’d come.

Now, with nothing around him for hundreds of miles, he felt more entombed than ever. 

The thought of leaving crept into his thoughts. There was nothing physically stopping him – he could return to the docks, or to Hoshido, or fly on till morning to anywhere in the world. He was free.

But he gently fell as he always knew he would, his treacherous heart pulling him back below the clouds and to the ships below. To one ship near the rear of the fleet in particular. To one figure in particular, leaning on the railing and watching the sky, evidently feeling better enough to walk unassisted. 

Corrin swooped low over the deck and shifted, draconic features melting away to be replaced by human ones. He miscalculates, losing his wings too high in the air, and would have fallen to the deck if Silas hadn’t reached out and caught him, pulling him to his chest.

“Are you okay?” the knight asked.

Corrin shook his head. “I should be asking you that. Can you be out by yourself? What if you fall?”

“I was feeling better.” He shrugged. “And besides, I got worried when I woke up and you weren’t there.”

Corrin left Silas without waking him out of courtesy, but leaving without a word may not have been the best idea considering things. “I apologize. I should have told you where I was going.”

Silas smiled. “I doubt you could’ve woken me anyway. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Really, though, are you okay? You were up there a long time.”

He was still holding Corrin. The stars shone in his eyes, and they seemed infinitely warmer in his gaze. Corrin hugged him tighter, careful to avoid his wound but still gripping hard enough for his inhumanly sharp nails to dig into the fabric of his shirt. He buried his face into the crook of his neck until Silas was all he could smell and he could feel a faint pulse beat against his lips, strong and delicate as a butterfly’s wing. “Better now that you’re here.” He mumbled.

Silas was quiet a moment, but then laughed and hugged him tighter as well. “Glad I could help. Come on, Camilla will kill me if I don’t at least try to get you back to bed before you catch something.”

Corrin supported him as they returned to their room (no matter how much Silas insisted he was fine, his steps were noticeably slow and pained). The walk was enough to sap the knight’s few remaining dregs of strength; he fell heavily on the bed and was asleep within seconds.

Corrin checked Silas’s bandages – still clean – and lay beside him. Even safely inside with his body exhausted, his mind was slow to settle. How long would things be stable like this? How long would his family and the man sleeping beside him stay safe? How long until this war or an order from Garon or even Corrin himself got them hurt again, or even killed? How in the world did his siblings handle the pressure?

He moved closer to the warmth beside him. Silas stirred, mumbled something and put his arm around him before falling back into slumber. 

He was falling to pieces day by day, but he would tear himself apart a thousand times if both families, and the one beside him, could avoid any more pain. 

He thought if he doubled down on his path, collateral damage could be minimized and his family would escape real harm. But it was as blood-soaked as any other, maybe more so, and he could see no way out.

**Author's Note:**

> maybe next time i can make something with a conclusion. Also chapter 10 is still the worst.
> 
> ancestrallizard.tumblr.com
> 
> twitter.com/DVLblues


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